Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  The viceroy then made sure to see Gandhi before he next spoke in public at a prayer meeting. A pressing invitation was sent for him to come to the Viceregal Lodge, a 340-room imperial pile in contrasting shades of red sandstone—which the Mahatma had recently proposed turning into a hospital—for what became a virtuoso recital by this great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India. The courtly Mountbatten used all the charm and flattery at his command to persuade his guest that the plan was actually a composite of Gandhi’s own ideas about non-coercion and self-determination, assuring what he had long sought—the earliest possible departure of the British. Really, the viceroy said, it should be called not the Mountbatten Plan but “the Gandhi Plan.” Gandhi must have known this massage was meant for his ego. But it eased the tension he’d been feeling. That evening at his prayer meeting, he said the viceroy was as much opposed to partition as the Congress. Since Hindus and Muslims couldn’t agree, the viceroy had “no choice.” If this was less than a green light, it was his way of saying proceed with caution.

  In using Mountbatten to get to Gandhi in this way on June 4, Nehru might have reflected that Gandhi had regularly dealt with viceroys and other colonial envoys without bothering to consult his own colleagues. As recently as April 1, Gandhi had “staggered” the newly arrived Mountbatten at their second meeting with the idea of offering Mohammed Ali Jinnah an opportunity to serve as head of the interim government in order to pry him loose from his fixation on Pakistan, long enough, at least, to avoid partition. Jinnah, in this scheme, would be free to include only members of the Muslim League. The corollary that this might have meant sending Congress into the wilderness didn’t particularly disturb Gandhi, who’d have considered that a small price to pay for the country’s unity, not to mention an opportunity for the movement to renew itself, finally, at its neglected grass roots as he’d been imploring it to do for two decades. It was part of Gandhi’s proposal, according to Mountbatten’s later reminiscences, that it would be the viceroy, not himself, who’d broach the scheme to Nehru and the other Congress leaders. Mountbatten, understandably, declined to serve as the Mahatma’s nuncio. By the time he and Nehru touched on the plan, the viceroy had already been told by his advisers that it was “an old kite” Gandhi had flown before, an idea Jinnah had never taken seriously. Nehru’s reaction was openly dismissive. He told the viceroy, with whom he was developing a more confidential relationship than any he had with his colleagues, that Gandhi “had been away for four months and was rapidly getting out of touch.”

  Gandhi drafted a nine-point summary of his plan. This would be the last of countless petitions and diplomatic notes and aide-mémoire he laid before British colonial authorities on three continents over half a century. Then he had to confess to Mountbatten what Mountbatten already knew: that his idea had attracted next to no support from the Congress high command. “Thus I have to ask you to omit me from your consideration,” he wrote abjectly, meaning he now lacked the influence to be considered someone who had to be consulted.

  When the viceroy first heard Gandhi’s audacious suggestion, he asked what Jinnah would say. “If you tell him I am the author, he will reply, ‘Wily Gandhi,’ ” he predicted. That’s close to what Jinnah did say. It’s not refuted by what Gandhi himself had to say to the viceroy, if Mountbatten’s paraphrase more than two decades after the fact can be accepted as somewhat accurate, rather than written off as a snippet of stray embroidery, a misattributed surmise. “Jinnah won’t be able to do very much,” Gandhi is supposed to have said, “because in effect you can’t coerce a majority by executive acts at the center and he’d have less power than he will think he’s going to get.” The catch in Gandhi’s “wily” scheme had all along been that his imagined Jinnah government would inevitably be responsible to an assembly with a Congress majority that could check it and, eventually, bring it down.

  The day after bowing out in his letter to Mountbatten, Gandhi returned to Bihar, where he’d spent scarcely three weeks on his earlier visit. He’d arrived in Bihar late, four months after the worst bloodshed, but found scant signs of remorse among most Hindus, including most congressmen, until he started preaching on themes of repentance, atonement, and unity. Often the killings, he was told, had been accompanied by cries of “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”—“Glory to Mahatma Gandhi!”

  “I hate to hear Jai shouts,” he said. “They stink in my nostrils when I think that to the shouting of these Jais, Hindus massacred innocent men and women, just as Muslims killed Hindus to the shouting of Allah-o-akbar! [‘God is great!’].”

  On his second swing through Bihar he managed to stay another two weeks before being summoned back to the capital. His moral authority had perhaps never been higher, but his political isolation couldn’t be ignored, leading him to feel, not for the first time, that his career as an active leader might have reached its terminus. The thought still didn’t sit easily in his mind. He called himself a “spent bullet” and a “back number.” He was now afflicted with a kind of split vision that was becoming chronic. On one level, he was resolute, ready to stand alone; on another, he allowed himself to wonder if the Congress leaders, now going their own way, might have a better grasp on the country’s needs. On the train to Bihar, he wrote a letter to his erstwhile disciple Vallabhbhai Patel, now yoked to Nehru in an uneasy duumvirate. “It is just possible,” he conceded, “that in administering the affairs of the millions you can see what I cannot. Perhaps I too would act and speak as you do if I were in your place.” In context, it sounds like a genuine doubt, not a gesture or courtesy, meant to placate. He’s asking whether India can possibly be run on Gandhian lines.

  The same sort of split vision shows up in what sounds like a valedictory comment on the efficacy of his campaigns. The nonviolent resistance he’d meant to inspire was muscular, disciplined, brave enough to risk injury, even death; this he called “the nonviolence of the strong.” All he’d evoked from the mass of Indians, he now commented, was mere passive resistance, “the nonviolence of the weak.” Speaking to an American professor in the first days of independence, he reflects that his career had been all along based on an “illusion.” He’s not bitter. He even manages to draw a measure of comfort from what he now presents as his disillusion. “He realized that if his vision were not covered by that illusion,” according to the summary he authorized of that conversation, “India would never have reached the point it had today.” If he’d conned anyone, he seems to be saying, it was himself. With at least a touch of pride, he said he wasn’t sorry.

  It’s monsoon season when he finally embarks on his long-promised return to Noakhali, hoping to arrive in the district in time for the dual independence of Pakistan and India. Going back to Noakhali would be a way of distancing himself from any responsibility for partition without having to denounce the Congress leadership, a way also to express his continued devotion to the cause of Hindu-Muslim “unity,” now seemingly down to its last gasp. “I do not like much that is going on here … [and] do not want it to be said that I was associated with it,” he’d written to Patel before embarking on this latest swing. This time he manages to get no farther than a demoted, deflated Calcutta: capital of the whole subcontinent, the entire Raj, until 1911 when the British announced their intention to shift the seat of government to Delhi; of an undivided Bengal thereafter; now, with partition, about to become the seat of a smallish Hindu-majority Indian rump state to be known as West Bengal.

  The Muslim League government had already decamped to Dacca, about to be proclaimed capital of East Pakistan, taking with it the upper tier of Muslims in the civil service and police, which were suddenly, by default, overwhelmingly Hindu again. Anxious Muslims who remained saw the writing on the wall—revenge for the Great Calcutta Killing of the previous year. Just as the Muslim League’s chief minister, Suhrawardy, had called on Gandhi then at the Sodepur ashram ten months earlier with the aim of getting him to change his travel plans, another Muslim League delegation waited on him there the da
y of his arrival, August 9, with an even more urgent plea. They implored him to stay in Calcutta to protect their community now living in terror, according to them, under the shadow of a Congress government.

  “We have as much claim on you as the Hindus,” the leader of the delegation, a former Calcutta mayor named Mohammad Usman, said on his return the next day. Usman belonged to the same Muslim League that had done much to precipitate the crisis, that only half a year earlier was decrying the Mahatma’s mission in East Bengal. But now that Gandhi had actually gone to Bihar and denounced as bestial and barbaric what Hindus had done to their co-religionists there, and now that partition had left them feeling vulnerable in a state where they’d be a minority henceforth and forever, Bengali Muslims left behind in India saw the Mahatma in a new light: as a potential savior. “You yourself have said that you are as much of Muslims as of Hindus,” the pleading former mayor said.

  Gandhi agreed to delay his return to Noakhali on two conditions. One was that the Muslims guarantee peace and the protection of minority Hindus in Noakhali as he had meant to do; if there were a provocation there, his life would be “forfeit” through fasting, he threatened. The other was that Suhrawardy—who’d rushed to Calcutta from Karachi on hearing of Gandhi’s arrival there—join him in a peace committee of two to maintain order in Calcutta as British rule ended.

  Suhrawardy was one Muslim League politician whose political fortunes had taken a dive with the advent of Pakistan. The united Bengal he’d governed was about to go out of existence; he would then hold office in neither Pakistan nor India, thanks in part to a quixotic and doomed eleventh-hour push he’d led to keep Bengal united, even if that meant its being partitioned off as a third independent state. The failure of that effort left the chief minister, an Urdu speaker who was not viewed as a true Bengali, as a leader without a following, an isolated, uncommitted actor with what seemed to be dwindling prospects. In the Mahatma’s depressed mood, that defined him again as a sympathetic character; it might even be said, as a disappointed fellow sufferer.

  The idea of a single Bengal uniting Hindus and Muslims had appealed to Gandhi as a refutation of Jinnah’s theory that they were, by definition, two nations—so much so that during the movement’s brief spasm in May, this elderly non-Bengali, this beginning student of the Bengali language, had offered to enlist as what amounted to a headquarters warrant officer. “I am quite willing,” the aging Mahatma wrote to Suhrawardy then, “to act as your honorary private secretary and live under your roof, till Hindus and Muslims begin to live as the brothers they are.”

  “What a mad offer!” Suhrawardy was supposed to have responded. “I will have to think ten times before I can fathom its implications.” In effect, Gandhi was offering to revive the partnership he’d had a quarter of a century earlier with the Khilafat leader Muhammad Ali.

  He wasn’t one to waste an inspiration. So taken was he with this latest scheme for reaching across the communal divide that now, three months later, on the eve of independence, he revived it, daring Suhrawardy to move with him into a troubled area of Calcutta whose Muslim residents felt vulnerable, to live with him there under the same roof without military or police protection. The Muslim Leaguer took a night to think it over, then agreed, attaching no conditions. On August 13, with less than two days to go to independence, the two moved into a ramshackle, abandoned mansion in a teeming area called Beliaghata where Muslim bustee, or shanty, dwellers lived at close quarters with marginally less impoverished Hindus who lived in houses, into which refugees from East Bengal had lately been crowding. The neighborhood had already been shown to be a tinderbox. Hindu gangs attacked Muslim dwellings with Sten guns and homemade grenades, putting their residents to flight.

  On his arrival, Gandhi was greeted with black flags and a chorus of abuse from a crowd of two hundred or so Hindus, some of whom tried to shove their way into the building through the window of the room reserved for the Mahatma. An attempt to close the old shutters was met by a barrage of stones. Once the young Hindu men were more or less calmed down, they demanded to know why Gandhi was so concerned about Muslims.

  He faced down the rowdiest in discussions that seem to have gone on for an hour or more. “We don’t need your sermons on ahimsa,” one of these young Hindus supposedly blurted out to his face. Gandhi told them he wouldn’t be bullied, that he’d never give in to force, nor call for help. Then he took up their charge that he was an enemy of Hindus. “Can’t you understand that being a Hindu by religion, deed and name, I cannot possibly be an enemy of my own community?” he retorted. To that the young men had no answer. Some finally volunteered to stand guard over him.

  A bemused Vallabhbhai Patel was only slightly more understanding. “So you have got detained in Calcutta … [in] a notorious den of gangsters and hooligans. And in what company too!” he wrote from New Delhi, where he was running the Home Ministry, making him the Indian official with paramount responsibility for keeping the peace. “It is a terrible risk.”

  The Hydari Manzil, as the dilapidated one-story villa was known, had only one toilet to accommodate its guests and the hundreds of visitors they attracted daily and only one charpoy, or string cot, which the old man refused to use as a bed, preferring the floor. The strong smell of ammonia, used in a hasty mopping to disinfect the place before the Mahatma moved in, hung in the air that first day. The scale of the villa was the only clue to its former opulence: ceilings about thirty feet high, large casements and doorways, the glass and the doors often smashed. Keeping his distance from the independence celebrations in Delhi, Gandhi made it his headquarters for the first three roller-coaster weeks of Indian independence. Today, with the installation of marble wainscoting, fluorescent lights, and the usual displays of old photographs, it’s a museum, yet another Gandhi shrine, only dimly reflective of the fears and passions that surged and then were tamed there in 1947.

  He’d been saying that he’d devote himself to fasting and spinning on Independence Day, August 15. When the BBC asked that he record a special independence message, the old man replied: “They must forget that I know English.” When All India Radio came with a similar request, he said: “I’ve run dry.” He awoke at 2:00 a.m. that day after only three hours of sleep. Beliaghata was quiet at that early hour, but a small, mostly Muslim crowd was waiting outside to congratulate him on the achievement of freedom. When daylight came, larger crowds began to gather. Strikingly, they were mixed; Hindus and Muslims who’d been taking up offensive and defensive positions days earlier were now celebrating together; according to contemporary reports, they were embracing and calling each other “brothers.” The euphoria lasted two weeks. Instead of another Great Calcutta Killing, there was suddenly talk of a Calcutta miracle, which many were quick to attribute to Gandhi’s presence and the example he’d set.

  With Suhrawardy at the wheel, Gandhi went out for a drive two nights in a row to witness the big civic party, soak up the joy. At first he wouldn’t allow himself to be drawn in, even when crowds in a Muslim section surrounded his car crying, “Jai Hind!” At his prayer meetings on the fifteenth and sixteenth, he spoke with chagrin about the rampaging celebrants who’d surged through Government House, the former seat of the viceroys (newly turned over to an Indian governor on Independence Day), stealing the silver, defacing pictures more or less in the spirit of the rowdy crowd that celebrated Andrew Jackson’s inauguration by ransacking the White House; and as reports came in on rioting in Lahore on the other side of the subcontinent, Gandhi went on mournfully about the bloodshed with which independence was being marked. His doubts about the durability of the Calcutta miracle persisted. “What if this is just a momentary enthusiasm?” he wrote to Patel.

  From one moment to the next, he was torn between wariness and hope. As the mixed throngs of Hindus and Muslims that turned out almost daily to hear him and Suhrawardy continued to swell—to half a million or more, it was reported on at least two occasions—he was reminded of the high tide of the Khilafat movement that had
swept him into a position of national leadership. “One might almost say that the joy of fraternization is leaping up from hour to hour,” he allowed himself to write.

  Shaheed Suhrawardy, who’d tried to maneuver him out of Noakhali earlier in the year, now basked in the glow of the Mahatma, paying him tribute for the joy and relief Calcutta was drawing from its astonishing plunge into amity. “All this is due to the infinite mercy of Allah and the good work of our beloved Bapu,” this Muslim Leaguer said. Mountbatten, now governor-general of an independent India, noted that a “boundary force” under British officers had been dispatched to the Punjab in hopes of containing the violence there. “In the Punjab,” he wrote, “we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting … May I be allowed to pay my tribute to the One Man Boundary Force, not forgetting his Second-in-Command, Mr. Suhrawardy.”

  Mountbatten’s letter was delivered to Gandhi on August 30. Gandhi then scheduled his return to Noakhali for September 1. But that day didn’t dawn peacefully. On what was to have been his last evening in Calcutta, the Hydari mansion, his Beliaghata command post, was again invaded by surly young Hindus with a score, they said, to settle with Suhrawardy. Luckily, the former chief minister had gone home to pack for the Mahatma’s Noakhali trip, for which he’d enlisted. According to Gandhi’s account, the invaders were carrying a Hindu man wrapped in bandages who had been stabbed by a Muslim, or so they claimed. On closer examination, it was shown he hadn’t been stabbed at all. Gandhi had just retired for the night; at first, he said, he lay still with his eyes shut. Then, hearing shouts and the smashing of more glass, the old man stepped into the adjoining reception room to face the attackers. It was his silent day, the one day a week he refrained from speech, but given the provocation, he made an exception.